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A great framework I have been recently moving into has proven a great resource. If you aren’t familiar with Laravel I highly recommend it.

It focuses on developers instead of the usual CMS system which is business oriented. I have been programming in PHP for over 15 years now and sometimes you get so stuck in your ways you stop learning new systems. I don’t know if any other programmers have ran into this, but it was definitely one of my sticking points.

The web development sphere moves very quickly and by far I am always impressed at finding a newer and better way of doing something. I started out using things like PHP-Nuke, and then Joomla and even wordpress. All great systems in their own right, but they focus on plug and play modules that if you ever want to go outside of that scope it becomes a nightmare; At least to me I guess.

Laravel seems to cater only to developers rather then the novice that just wants to make a website and not customize anything. Not that this is a bad thing, but I find lots of my clients always wanting to tweak things, or even the time it takes to learn a new system is daunting when people just want to do their job and move on with their lives. Designing custom systems with a Laravel backend so far has proven very fast. I was able to produce several very high quality, clean, and secure websites in just a month or 3 depending on complexity. Often times you can even reuse parts of that code base which makes clients happy and me. I have code that is tested by multiple sites and I can tweak it myself. The packages that are included are all managed with Composer and GitHub so it makes it very easy to create your own, share, or even contact another developer and get some help with their creation.

It is a cool eco-system to jump into and I’d love to hear of others experience with Laravel. You can learn more by reading the documentation – http://laravel.com/docs/5.1 or even watching some of the videos on YouTube.